by apl, 2023
My Existential Fear of Public Writing
I stop short when I try to document the content that courses through my mind and body. (Three Part Prose Poem / Exploratory Lit.)
I sit down to write. My fingers freeze.
The currents of analysis is bursting from my brain, like a stopped faucet in need of release.
I can’t wait, leaning forward, hips tilted in my chair toward the screen. I am eager, enthralled and amazed, running hot to get these concepts into the world. Into the world…
Where is the world? Aren’t I just as much of a world as the world itself?
The internet is a non-place used almost entirely to describe the physical realities within which our human existence is located. We join together, from vastly different lives, with disparate data about the meaning of humanness, with increasing consciousness and fear of death, creating and absorbing into a virtual space.
A space with less than two dimensions, technically speaking.
Money. I can’t provide my ideas to the ether for fear of losing them.
I want money. I want money to survive more easily, better, and for a longer amount of time. I expect, with not much evidence, that this money shall be born from these ideas. That my creations are my future wallet.
That my brain is the source of my survival.
It is so much easier to write when comfortable. It is so much easier to do anything when we feel safe. My psychiatrist said that I need to adapt myself to challenges more effectively; that emotional and psychological resilience are healthy and protective factors in psychological outcomes. Or, that’s how I heard it anyway.
My eyes and head remember the feeling of grief. Loss after loss but almost none of them were death. I feel the experience of past elation in my body. I observe the fast undulations of emotional and physical sensation of being human. The rising pressure of having to pee, or not, or hydrate, or not, or get out of the sun, or get into the sun, or stretch, or sit still. These electrical machines of atoms, of cells, attuned to the minutia of being.
We inhabit delicate vessel, from which to create.
And yet we must trust the world to receive the projects and gifts that are born so gently of these vessels; the genius that is sometimes birthed so ferociously from the kingdom of our flesh.
Our minds and thinking and writing seem too often limited by our time and strength.
I write around the concepts.
As usual, I notice the tension of a gnawing desire to express and a deep fear of expressing into nothingness.
Of losing the expression into the abyss. Of sacrificial infant ideas, ready for consumption, afraid of being gone forever. Gone forever like hundreds of Docs forgotten. Like the ghosts of posts past. Like the memories of the money I could’ve made or the lives I could’ve changed.
I sense the internal wave of shivering that I indeed have some time left. I have life left within which to create. That I will probably continue, at least for a while, to survive. Praying to the internet for the spacious permission to create and create and create.
That the void is just a void and that we humans are nothing more than ourselves.
We weave the tiniest of moments into a fragile tapestry of mutual hope.
We seek the memory of our ancient bodies, decomposed. We tie down the sky to keep ourselves from floating away. We are the people of Planet Earth, of Earth’s internet, of the ideas and writing that bring us home to our own consciousness, over and over and over again.
I’m here to create, just like anyone and everyone else. I’ve suffered enough.
Now I want to use that suffering for something. For anything.
I am concerned to the point of stillness of losing my precious, beloved ideas. But it would be worse to lose them by never having offered them at all.
I sit. I write in circles around my greatest ideas. I cage in my fear, like a small rabbit. I let it hop, and sing, and chatter. I feed it carrots. I notice the rabbit pray, small paws like a mouse. A mouse that shimmies into the warm and protective palm of myself.
Last night, I dreamed of a nestling mouse.
The cutest, most puppy-like mouse I had ever seen. Then, something terrible happened. But I pray for her, dipping the idea of the tiny creature into the ether, alongside my writing. Loss is a myth. The mythology of death. We are just big stars crunched up into smaller bodies.
The mouse is just a symbol for the rabbit of my fears.
The sad fate of the mouse, which I shall not write here, is just homage to my deep caring, my small heart of compassion for the writing. For all of our writing. For the humans that, so small in this galaxy, continue to pull from the fabric of the cosmos, into consciousness, as we create, create, and create.
We are nothing against the backdrop of possible bravery.
So, as always, I will not forget to create. I will not stop myself. I will ride the tides of fear or sorrow, and dive into the black water of the deepest oceans. I will pull up fishes and pray over them; water into water, with a shimmer into the sky.
I will soothe lost beach mice along the shore. I will write my ideas privately, and consider their lifetimes. Where will these ideas live, if not in the possible awareness of other human beings through the portal of our virtual realms? Where can I place them?
Ideas so delicate, like living beings, ready to scamper toward the bright shores of existence beyond just me.
Photosynthetic ideas, like underwater algae, breathing into the symbols of lifetimes beyond me. Giving energy into the ocean, available nutrients, awakening over the course of time.
I want to offer my mind to the future. I want the future to offer abundance to me.
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